The videos always start the same way.

Ichika Nito sits down with his guitar, the camera at a clean angle, and then plays something that your brain cannot immediately process. Not because it is flashy. Because it is so precise and melodically intelligent and rhythmically unexpected all at the same time that by the time you have understood what just happened in the first four bars, he is already six bars further on. The comments section fills immediately with guitarists saying they need to go practice. The shares start. Someone posts it to a forum where someone else says this cannot be real. And then more people come, and more, and suddenly a Japanese guitarist playing intricate instrumental compositions in a bedroom has an audience that spans every continent.

That is how India found Ichika Nito. And in February and March 2025 he came to find India back.

Ichika Nito is from Japan, where he developed his guitar style in private before the internet made it everyone else’s business. He has been described as playing in a genre that does not quite exist yet, somewhere between ambient music and technical guitar and jazz and something that sounds like microtones and polyphonic tapping and melody lines that seem to come from more than one instrument at the same time. What he does with a standard guitar is genuinely different from what most guitarists understand to be possible.

His presence on YouTube and Instagram grew through a specific format that became his signature. Short clips. Difficult compositions played with apparent ease, the camera steady, the playing unhurried. The meme format, as some have described it, of framing impossible guitar playing as if it were the most normal thing in the world. That casual quality around extraordinary ability is not accidental. It reflects something real about how he approaches music. Technical difficulty for its own sake does not interest him. The feeling the notes create does.

In July 2020, readers of the British guitar magazine Total Guitar ranked Ichika Nito as the eighth greatest guitarist in the world in their 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. He was placed ahead of players with decades more experience and global name recognition. John Petrucci of Dream Theater, whose own India debut happened just months earlier, has expressed support and admiration for Ichika’s playing. Pete Townshend of The Who has done the same. When the guitar world’s most respected voices start pointing at one person and saying pay attention, it means something.

His EPs, released across the past few years, are thematic and specific. Not collections of songs but explorations of a particular emotional or sonic territory, developed in full across the runtime. I Miss You. Flowers. Window. Songs named for simple things that carry enormous weight when the music plays. His recent work with his band Dios expanded the compositional palette further, bringing his guitar language into a group context where the arrangements breathe differently.

And then he gave his first live India masterclass performances at NAMM in 2023 and began touring internationally with a level of intensity that suggests someone who understands exactly the moment they are in.

The India tour in early 2025 covered three cities. Mumbai on February 27. Delhi NCR on February 27. Bengaluru on March 2 at GYLT, where the doors opened at 7:30 PM and the show ran from 9 to 10 PM. Organised by Skillbox and presented as a LiveBox event. An hour of Ichika Nito live in three Indian cities, for a fanbase that had been watching the videos and listening to the EPs and telling each other about this for years.
The setlist in Bengaluru moved through I Miss You, Isomnia, Lost, Flowers, Window, Branching Paths, The World is Still Beautiful, Moonfall, Isolation, Drowsy, Transformed. Songs that in a live setting become something different from the recorded versions because you are watching the mechanism. Watching the hands do the things your brain kept insisting were edited or layered or somehow augmented. They are not. It is just him, the guitar, and a level of musical intelligence that lands as something closer to a conversation than a performance.

Indian guitar fans had waited a long time for this. The kind of musician who makes other musicians want to go home and practise, walking into a room full of Indian musicians and music lovers who had already done their homework. That combination produces something electric, even in the quietest moments of the music.

Myfandom brought the official Ichika Nito India merch to life for the debut tour, exclusively for Indian fans. Always Official. Only on MYFANDOM.